Tom Wright: Insurance must address the risks of ageing society

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Tom Wright, the CEO of Age UK and Age International, gave a presentation on "The needs of an ageing population" at the Swiss Re Institute's NGIC 2017: Solutions for an ageing society conference at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue.

"It's about innovation and new products and services to support people going into later life. And in many areas, the financial service industry has been very poor at addressing and accommodating the needs of aging society. And as we live longer, often with great wealth as well, it's a huge market opportunity and there's great need out there for more insurance products and services.

The challenges of an aging society is that we are all living longer, two years every decade since 1830. It's a great progression in health and science but, we live longer in poorer health. So we have a particular challenge that we live six years of our life in relatively poor health towards the end. And that has considerable challenges for our health and social care systems, and for pension provision as well.

But the flip side is that the opportunities in the U.K. we now have a million people working over the age of 65, and we're seeing more and more people working later and longer in life. And that's both highly productive for making a great contribution to our economies.

The digital world can help and support many older people. Both through supporting their independence at home, but also connecting them up better to interests, hobbies, families and friends. Insurance is very important because, many of the risks as we age are very particular to parts of society.

So, many people will have relatively modest care needs but, many more will have huge care needs. So how do we cover that, and we have some type of insurance to support those who might have very high care needs is a very important consideration, which the insurance industry hasn't really got to grips with."